Crash and Burn

You never thought it would happen to you, you always thought it would happen to someone else.

Yup, my PC (or my hard disk , to be more accurate) crashed last Tuesday. I was saving some photos when the monitor suddenly went black. When I rebooted, I knew I had a problem. Just a week ago, it was Joy (my officemate) who sent her CPU to our PC engineers. Luckily, the problem was only her motherboard, so she got 100% back. Mine wasn’t lucky.

Tuesday afternoon, when they said my PC was in ICU (50-50 was the Help Desk engineer’s term), I was 50% hopeful and 50% hopeless. When our PC at home crashed months ago, all our files were wiped out. I feared that the same thing was going to happen to mine. I prayed and asked for the intercession of St. Isidore of Seville (patron saint of computers and the Internet) and even that of St. Expedite. Even though I tried not to count on it, I prayed just the same. I tried not to think about it, all about the implications and consequences if the inevitable happens. All my outputs for the past 8 years in Insular Life as a marketing specialist were there inside that hard disk. Databases, statistics, research and studies, memos, simply put : just about everything. I was supposed to deliver a presentation on our website to Sales on Thursday. Oh my God, I don’t have a copy, just a print-out. I didn’t want to do the power point slides (more than 20, I think) all over again.

Wednesday, I got the confirmation that I wasn’t going to retrieve any file at all. I wanted to cry but what could I do? My officemates were incredulous, “What??? Couldn’t they do anything?” Well, I tried to reason out to myself that of course, they would have done everything to save my files - if only they could. I just joked about it the rest of the day, playing my mp3 files (the only ones I have in my flash disk). Yes, I do have a flash disk and we do have a DVD writer which I should have used to create back-ups. But I, who used to nag my husband for not doing so then, had to learn it the hard way, too. Hindi pa nadala. I told my officemates, mabuti pa yata magresign na lang ako. But then, I asked myself, who would have me, wala akong market value – I who have nothing. I passed by our VP’s office and announced, “Ma’am, please don’t ask anything from me. Because I won’t be able to give it to you.”

Later I texted my kumpare, one of our PC engineers, and asked if there was ever a chance that they could have been saved. He said that’s usually the case, but they really do check the hard disk drive and do the best they could. Ok. Case closed.

Right now, I am starting from scratch, slowly picking up the pieces, trying to retrieve anything I could – from my boss’s Outlook (good thing she doesn’t delete email messages so I was able to save some of my attachments), and from other officemates. But the rest have gone up to PC Heaven.  Including my emails. Sayang. I am like a new employee – with an empty PC.

And about that power point presentation, my boss emailed me the soft copy I sent her, which needed revisions but that was better than nothing. Sigh.